A hateful voice is no more

Televangelist Pat Robertson has died at the age of 93. He was a malign influence on US politics, creating a toxic mix of religious bigotry and rightwing politics.

Robertson’s enterprises also included Regent University, an evangelical Christian school in Virginia Beach; the American Center for Law and Justice, which defends the first amendment rights of religious people; and Operation Blessing, an international humanitarian organization.

But for more than half a century, Robertson was a familiar presence in American living rooms, known for his 700 Club television show, and in later years, his televised pronouncements of God’s judgment on America for everything from homosexuality to the teaching of evolution.
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Robertson started the Christian Coalition in Chesapeake in 1989, saying it would further his campaign’s ideals. The coalition became a major force in Republican politics in the 1990s, mobilizing conservative voters through grassroots activities.

The venom of his message was masked by his genial, avuncular manner and the occasional goofy pronouncements where he would blame all manner of human-caused and natural disasters on the LGBTQ+ community and other perceived enemies of his version of Christianity.
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The Republican race for the nomination takes shape

This is an unusual race. Normally, if an incumbent president runs for election, few will try to challenge them for the nomination and at least in the recent past, none have succeeded in doing so. Lyndon Johnson was a notable case in that he decided to not run again in 1968. This was due to the intense opposition to the Vietnam war but it is not clear what might have happened if he had sought the nomination. The fact that his own vice-president Hubert Humphrey, whom he endorsed, got the nomination suggests that he might have won.

If an incumbent wins the presidency but loses their re-election bid (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush) they fade from the scene and do not try to come back four years later, leaving the field wide open for another member for their party to seek the nomination, and that usually leads to a large field of candidates.

This year is an anomaly at least on the Republican side. We have a one-term president in serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT), who is not only seeking to make a comeback after losing his re-election bid, he even claims that he did not lose. And we have a large segment of the party establishment and membership either actually endorsing that delusional claim or pretending to in order not to offend SSAT. And SSAT seems to have the support of a significant number of party faithful

Because of this fact, SSAT is almost like an incumbent and so I am surprised that so many Republicans have decided to challenge him. We have SSAT’s vice president Mike Pence, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, current governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum (whom even someone like me who follows politics closely had never heard of), right wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy, and radio host Larry Elder. That makes 10 in all including SSAT. And there may be more to come.
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The problem with men

We live in a world dominated by men in pretty much every area of life. Hence anyone who argues that the state of men is in danger has a pretty tough row to hoe. And yet, that is the alarm that some people are sounding, that in our efforts to create gender parity, we are overlooking the fact that many men are currently really struggling to cope in contemporary US society and that the trends for them are not good.

To have a serious discussion about this, we have to first get beyond the more absurd exaggerations of people like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

[W]ho could forget the “Tucker Carlson Originals” special “The End of Men,” which introduced the world to “bromeopathy,” the patriotic practice of bathing one’s testicles in red light? That special also featured hand-wringing about “soy boys,” paeans to raw-egg slonkers, and homoerotic montages, apparently filmed on Alex Jones’s bocce court, that looked like Abercrombie & Fitch ads directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Again, it’s easy to brush all this off as a campy, desperate ploy for attention, which it was. But “The End of Men” also made an argument: American men are being systematically emasculated by some sort of ill-defined global cabal, for the purpose of slowing down birth rates in “the West”; only “well-ordered, disciplined groups of men,” presumably after being armed and restored to testicular health, can “reëstablish order” and restore Western civilization. This is the sort of thing that seems funny until it doesn’t.

The more serious aspects of this issue are discussed by Idrees Kahloon in the January 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker.
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Existential alarms about AI and longtermism

AI has been much in the news recently. The initial splash was with ChatGPT and its potential to enable students to use it for writing assignments and the threat to eliminate the jobs of people whose work consisted mainly of writing. But suddenly things took a very dark turn and warnings that AI threatens the future of humankind are suddenly all over the media. We now have a public statement signed by 350 tech executives and AI researchers that warns of the danger of extinction of humanity posed by this technology. The signatories including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI the creator of ChatGPT who testified before congress. The statement says in its entirety:

Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

Extinction is a pretty dire word and this naturally set off alarm bells.

But there has also been a backlash to this statement, with arguments that the dangers are being overblown and that people like some of the signatories, especially those associated with the tech industry, are fear mongering to cover their self-interest.
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A former gun industry executive speaks out

Ryan Busse, a former vice president of sales for a major gun manufacturer, explains how the gun industry went off the rails and went from advocating sensible gun use to now promoting the massive sales of weapons that are being used in shootings.

[T]here was a time not that long ago, maybe about 15 to 20 years ago, when the industry understood a sort of fragile social contract needed to be maintained on something as immensely powerful as the freedom to own guns. And so the industry didn’t do certain things. It didn’t advertise in egregiously irresponsible ways. It didn’t put, you know, growth, company growth, above all other things. There were just these unspoken codes of conduct the industry knew not to violate. And those seem to have broken down. And now it’s kind of a victory at all costs. And sadly, I think there’s a lot of cost.
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There were people who agreed with everything I said before the sort of radical shifts started to happen in about 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. But, you know, as with most things, when you earn a paycheck from something, you’re likely to be greatly influenced by it. And so, over time, most of the people in the industry have either converted to a true belief in the sort of radicalized Second Amendment absolutism that now I think is very dangerous, or they have just left the industry. There is only a place for complete, 100% devotion.
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What no other society has had is 425 million guns and this culture, on the right, that tells young men that to be real young men, they must purchase an AR-15 and go out and solve their problems. The industry 15 years ago would not even allow the AR-15 to be used or displayed at its own trade shows. I mean, they were locked up in a corner. You had to have military or police credentials to even go in there. Now, they’re spread around like crazy, and the marketing campaigns are so aimed at young men that in some ways, it’s not shocking that Uvalde or Buffalo or [the July 4 shooting at a parade in the Chicago suburb of] Highland Park, all three heinous crimes, all three committed with AR-15s, all by very young men. It’s not shocking to me that those happen; it’s shocking to me that they don’t happen every day.
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You know, I tell the story that 15, 20 years ago, the industry named guns like the Smith & Wesson 629 or the Remington 870 because you had [industry] attorneys that knew that even the names of guns could be important. They could encourage people to do irresponsible things. And so you’d never wanted to even name things that might encourage bad things to happen. Now we have a gun called the Wilson Urban Super Sniper. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? We now have a gun called the Ultimate Arms Warmonger. What are you supposed to do with that? We now have an AR-15 company called Rooftop Arms, as in when you don’t get what you want, you vote from the rooftops. And what happened in Highland Park? A kid got up and killed people from a rooftop. You see the old self-imposed responsibility; those old norms of behavior have been just completely trashed.

It’s a pretty sobering piece.

Horse racing is even worse than I thought

A month ago, I wrote about my astonishment that as many as seven horses that had had to be euthanized in the few days in the run up to the Kentucky Derby.

It turns out that the situation was even worse than that and that 12 horses had died there since April 27. As a result, yesterday it was announced that the location has suspended all events for about a month pending an investigation.

After a series of concurrent investigations by Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority, “no single factor has been identified as a potential cause and no discernable pattern has been detected to link the fatalities,” according to a statement from the track. The racetrack’s surface has also been deemed “consistent with prior measurements” from previous years and thus “has not raised concerns.”
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A day before Churchill Downs announced it would suspend racing operations, the famed track and HISA introduced a series of new safety measures. Those changes include the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit collecting blood and hair samples for all fatalities involving covered horses and Churchill Downs restricting horses to four starts over a rolling eight-week period. Churchill Downs also added “ineligibility standards for poor performance,” so horses that lose a race by more than 12 lengths in five consecutive starts will be barred from competing again until approved by the equine medical director.

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The other defamation case by E. Jean Carroll

A jury found that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) guilty of sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll decades ago and said that he should pay her $2 million in damages for the assault and another $3 million in damages for defaming her. The very next day, SSAT appeared at a live event that was broadcast by CNN in front of a specially chosen friendly crowd where he proceeded once again to say the same things about Carroll that the jury had said constituted defamation.

Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan then filed an amended suit against SSAT asking this time for punitive damages. When juries award damages in a civil suit, then assign a monetary value for the actual damage suffered by the claimant and can also add punitive damages which are meant to punish the defendant and discourage such behavior in the future. In the Carroll case, they did not award punitive damages and SSAT’s actions immediately after suggested that he was not at all remorseful by being rebuked.
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Debt ceiling raised just in time

The deal to raise the debt ceiling has passed both houses of congress with bipartisan support and will be signed into law by president Biden on Saturday, two days before the projected X-date (June 5th) when treasury secretary Janet Yellen said the government will run out of money to pay its bills. As of Thursday evening, the closing balance in the government’s account was just $22.892 billion, the lowest it has been since the recent crisis started.

The current debt ceiling limit is $31.4 trillion which has already been reached. The deal did not raise the ceiling by a fixed amount. Instead it agreed to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025, just after the next election. As I understand it, ‘suspension’ means that there is no debt ceiling at the moment so it is possible that the US treasury could, in theory at least, run up the debt by a huge amount by selling off US treasury bills.

But I don’t think they will do that.

The dangers of social media for young people

The US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has warned that excessive use of social media by young people carries serious health risks.

“Teens who use social media for more than three hours a day face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms, which is particularly concerning given that the average amount of time that kids use social media is 3 1/2 hours a day,” the Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

According to the advisory, 95% of teenagers ages 13-17 say they use a social media app, and more than a third say they use it “almost constantly.” The Social Media and Youth Mental Health advisory says social media can perpetuate “body dissatisfaction, disordered eating behaviors, social comparison, and low self-esteem, especially among adolescent girls.”

Nearly 1 in 3 adolescents report using screens until midnight or later, the advisory says. And most are using social media during that time.

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Frederick Douglass memoir of being a slave

I recently read the memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-1895), who in 1838 escaped from slavery in Maryland to freedom in New York. This document’s account ends shortly after he got his freedom. While yet a slave, he had surreptitiously taught himself to read and write, an offense for which he could be severely whipped if discovered. His memoir is extremely well written, so much so that many people at that time did not believe that he could ever have been a slave.

After moving to New Bedford, Connecticut, he attended an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket in 1841 where he got up and spoke for the first time in a group consisting of both white and Black people. He was discovered to be a powerful orator with a compelling life story and became one of the most prominent voices for abolition. His memoir can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg and other locations.

His story of his days in slavery are harrowing. The unremitting cruelty of that institution is a reminder of how low human beings can sink once they decide that some group of people are so inferior to them that they do not deserve even the most basic of humane treatment.

He also seeks to correct some misconceptions, such as the role of singing among slaves. We know that that there is a rich tradition of Black music that came out of slavery. Apologists for slavery used the singing of slaves as an indicator that they were happy with their lot but Douglass says in Chapter II that the opposite is true, that the singing indicates deep sorrow.

I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. I have often sung to drown my sorrow, but seldom to express my happiness. Crying for joy, and singing for joy, were alike uncommon to me while in the jaws of slavery. The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.

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